After everyone expresses shock at something horrible that Spike did: “When are you people going to remember that I HATE YOU!”
My wife always used to cry, “Why is Spike being so mean?”, and I’d always tell her, “Maybe it’s because Spike is pure evil.”
Also note that Buffy didn’t end up killing Angel without knowing it. She knew he turned back into Angel, and decided to kill him anyway.
You remember precisely correctly. That’s how The Ringworld Engineers ended, and Louis not only had to make that decision (to kill 1.5 trillion people to save the rest), he also had to kill his old friend Teela Brown because, as a Protector, she could clearly visualize 1.5 trillion lives and couldn’t allow their deaths even though it would save the remaining 28.5 trillion people on the other 95% of the Ringworld. However, at the beginning of the sequel The Ringworld Throne, the Hindmost revealed to a distraught-and-committing-slow-suicide-by-aging Louis Wu that his computers were far more powerful than the protector Teela Brown had realized, and they were able to control the superconducting magnetic network so well that they were able to feed the sun’s flaring plasma jets directly into the rim wall attitude jets, without having to irradiate the entire million-miles-wide-by-5%-of-the-ring that lay between the rim walls. Everybody Louis had met, that he’d been feeling guilty about having had to kill, was actually fine, except for a somewhat increased cancer rate amongst the Spill Mountain folk who lived right up against the rim walls.
I thought it might be the First Evil because it seemed to enjoy tormenting Angel, so I figured it might have wanted the soul-restoring to succeed so that Angel himself could spend a 500-year interval in a lovely little hell dimension at the hands of his own girlfriend.
She didn’t really kill him anyway, just sent him to a hell dimension. I know even on the show they sometimes would say she killed him but come on, he was no more dead than Fred was when she got transported to Pylea.
Anyway… speaking of vampires…
Mitchell on the UK version of Being Human
Spoilers for up the the series 3 finale
[spoiler]Box Tunnel 20
Not something he did back in his past when he was a bad boy, but an absolute atrocity he commits after spending years “reforming”. Amazingly, they don’t just gloss it over, but make it a major part of the plot for the following series, and ultimately it leads to his whole life with George and Annie crashing down and George staking him. [/spoiler]I don’t know where the US version is heading (assuming there’s even a season 2) but I doubt it’ll go down that way.
What was the atrocity?
chorpler,
Many thanks. I know I read Ringworld Throne, but did not remember that part. I’ll have to read it again.
I agree with you, so far as Louis was concerned, they would die, so it counts.
Have you read any of the Fleet of Worlds prequels? I only recently discovered them at the Library. They seem pretty good to me, though not the same quality as Ringworld.
Well she had no choice at that point - to save the world, the sword had to go back into the demon-guy, through Angel (as I recall).
hmmm. I think Walt is the quintessential good guy who does horrible things…Jesse even more so. Jesse is a sweetie.
I guess it comes down to a person’s opinion of at what point do your deeds define you?
Nothing else defines us but our deeds. What I think, believe, hope for, dream of, even what I love doesn’t matter: just what I do.
Yes I’ve read all four of them. They get better as they go along. Edward Lerner does a pretty good job at “playing in the playground,” in my opinion.
I agree, and I was going to go there, except that our deeds are many, and if there wasn’t some degree of “good person/horrible deeds” this thread would be moot.
So I’ll be more specific: at what point do we decide that a person’s bad deeds cancel out her good deeds and actually define him or her as a bad person?
I think motive needs to be taken into account, certainly. Walt’s motives were excellent…but at what point does he have to answer the question of why the people he loves apparently rate above all other living beings so that it’s ok or forgivable to be the direct or indirect cause of other people’s deaths in the service of taking care of your family?
As for Jesse, I don’t think he’s a bad guy at all, and the only really bad thing he’s done (or we think he’s done… lord, let July come NOW!) was motivated by self-preservation and desperation.
Wasn’t he, even before Walt found him, already making and dealing lots of methamphetamine, and adulterating it with chili powder?
Yes. As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t make him bad. I don’t even know that it’s really a bad thing…I’m very much in favor of adults having access to whatever stupid, life-destroying drugs they prefer, and I think drug laws themselves are responsible for the majority of the harm that comes to the greater society because of drugs, so while Jesse was breaking the law, I don’t consider it defining him as a bad person, particularly since he has consistently shown himself to have a genuine moral center as well as the courage to stand up for that center, so by my lights he’s much, much, much more of a good guy.
Obviously, YMMV.
OK, then, I think I agree. It wasn’t like he was trying to entice people to try his product via advertising, or lying to them about what they were getting, or deliberately getting them addicted, and he wasn’t selling to kids. He was deliberately adulterating his product with chili powder as his “trademark,” but the buyers knew about that, so it was all being done above-board.
I think his character in Big Love was cool, too…
“Other Watchmen” doesn’t imply a formal team or organization. Still, since they are Alan Moore characters, maybe “other science-heroes” might be the way to go.
In the context of this thread, would the Bible be considered “literature”? Many of the heroes of the Old Testament (esp. Lot, Jacob, Noah and David) are considered “heroes” because the narrative tells us God favors them. Judged more objectively, they are at minimum total dicks and, in David’s case, even worse.
Aye, I’d say Ozymandias from The Watchmen counts.
Also, how about Harry Dresden? Specifically, in chapter 28 of Death Masks: Harry and Michael and Sanya have Cassius trapped in a hotel room, but Michael and Sanya refuse to kill Cassius after he gives up the demon coin that’s been possessing him and helping him do monstrous, evil things for literally hundreds of years. Michael and Sanya leave the room, but Harry stays behind and:
And then Harry beats the fucking shit out him with a baseball bat. It’s easily one of my favorite moments of the whole series. 
All these Bujold references, and none to Aral Vorkosigan?
Aral, an honorable, upright sort of guy, went along with Emperor Ezal in his scheme to kill Ezal’s psychotic son Serg by basically arranging events so that a whole bunch of people were killed and Serg was just one of many. Aral went along with it because the Emperor convinced him it would be better than a psychotic Emperor Serg.
How about Miyo from Order of the Stick?
True, given that the OP didn’t require the character to be both “heroic” and “sympathetic”.
A couple examples I remember from Irredeemable (a superhero comic that begins with the Plutonian – a Superman-level hero with no known vulnerabilities – going batshit crazy and his surviving teammates trying to find some way to stop him):
[spoiler]Bette Noire had a piece of wax from a candle that temporarily negated Plutonian’s powers while it burned. She kept this secret because she didn’t want to reveal the circumstances under which she’d obtained it (it was used to avoid the Man-of-Steel-Woman-of-Kleenex problem while she cheated on her fiance with him).
The Hornet had been suspicious of the Plutonian even before he snapped. A flashback of the heroes battling an alien invasion shows the Hornet cutting a deal with the aliens to leave Earth alone in exchange for teleport technology and the locations of other inhabited planets for them to invade instead.
[/spoiler]